Here at Home

Had an occupy event down home in Vancouver yesterday.  Pretty interesting.

Mostly, I was happy to see folks getting out and starting to talk.  Yeah, yeah, there was no "clear message" and the speeches were uninspired, but that really isn't the point.  Folks were out talking, taking in a nice day, and trying to figure out what the hell it was that was happening to them.

We are at the trying on stage for slogans right now.  99% appears to be the leader, and folks use it quite a bit.  There is a hodge-podge of folks trotting out their nominees for the root of the problem

I am getting some hope.  There are pitfalls to avoid.  The democrat-whores are trying to co-opt the movement the way that the republican-whores co-opted the tea-baggers.  The movement has to start coalescing and getting the non-Che Guevara folks with a lick of sense out in front.

But, I would guess between 500 and 1,000 folks came out today in a sleepy little bedroom community to express discontent.  You really have to be a little hopeful.

Saturday Listening

Jonathon Coulton has always appealed to us nerdy WOW types.

Less

I always tell folks to head over to Mayberry's place for a good rant and some thinking material.

He recently wrote a bit about his forever hypothetical perfect boat (Craig, don't get your tits in an uproar, this is a common failing of all boat -loving types, we all love you anyway).  He spoke of a nice little boat and the desire for a little thirty horsepower engine to run it.

Now when you think about it, he is on the right track.  But I guess that, being the forever hypothetical perfect world guy that I am, I would approach the problem from a different angle.  In this light I will spend some time using him as an example while you, gentle readers, can use the idea should you wish to apply it to other pursuits.

Here's the deal, Mayberry is ratcheting down from a absurdly high level of motor power found on most boats here in America.  Maybe it would behoove him to look at this website to get an idea of how little engine is needed to make a huge difference.  He is doing the right thing in thinking small.  I think that mast and sails and very small engines are the way to approach things.

I took this picture over in Thailand back in 2005.  I was driving around the countryside in Phetchabun province and I had stopped over at one of the little stores to stretch my legs and drink a couple of Singha before I went back to the hotel.  The place where I stopped was the middle of farm country.  The harvest was going on and they were hauling stuff everywhere.  I stayed way too long drinking beers and watching the "water buffalos" hauling stray and sugar cane up and down the road.  It is a good memory.

But the "water buffalos" hauled a lot of stuff.  The little five and ten horsepower engines were more than capable of hauling damn big loads.  I would guess that they got yield pretty damn similar to those here in the west for a tenth the energy inputs.  These Thai farmers weren't air conditioned, and there were more of them on the job, but the yields were astonishing.

I don't think that  I think that if you want to get by in the not so distant future, you had better start looking hard at the energy inputs going into your ventures.  The way we have been doing are so overpowered and so ingrained, it will take a radical re-evaluation of our energy use requirements, as well as our desires.

Hat Trick Jesse

What is the meaning of #occupy?

Jon Stewart

I realize that I put up a lot of stuff from Jon Stewart and the Daily Show.  But, the guy is a talented performer coupled with great writers and he make me laugh frequently.  I will keep posting clips and I will keep laughing at/with him.

But what is starting to worry me is the way that a lot of folks seem to be getting the bulk of their news from his show.   Granted, the guy can keep you up on the fact that the world's leaders are the same flavor of dumb-ass as the folks who elected them, but is that enough information for people to make a decision about things that are going on around them?

Granted, the mass market media that tries to pass itself off as a news source sure as hell isn't sufficient to the task.  The blogs and alt-media are just as limited, usually being tied to a singular focus and not especially interested in actually looking at both sides of an issue.

So what you have is the creation of a set of news sources that allow one to get a flavor of what is really happening behind the self-interest tinged squealing of the different sources that I have outlined above.  When I was stationed over in Europe during the last six months of my enlistment, I got into the habit every night of listening to the BBC World Service, Armed Forces Network, and Radio Moscow.  If I slept on the raw data, then thought a little bit about it, I usually managed to figure out what was happening.

I would recommend something similar.  I now tend to read the Economist, Naked Capitalism, and Foreign Policy.  I also let Jim over at Some Assembly Required troll for my outrage fix de jour.


The world is a complicated place.  Looking for one news source to make it simpler will not give you the "truth" will only let you become myopic.  Stop trying to simplify things to make it fit some model that you think that can understand.

Styles

Apple Computer has had a strange hold on me.

It has been years now since I routinely used one of their products, the last of my Apples are now dying a slow death.  Obviously, I am not going to replace them with the current batch of overpriced eye candy that is the lifeblood of Apple

I'm kinda wondering how this will play out.  I watched Apple barf up a lung and almost go under before. Steve Jobs brought them into play, and later saved them from certain death before.  I am not certain that a flim-flam man of his astonishing ability to create style is available to make something from nothing again.

It was BSD with a pretty picture.  It thrived by cheapening and atomizing an already commodity product (American Music) and enhancing the self absorption of its users.  The astounding construction of an eighty billion dollar war chest and concomitant awarding to its CEO eight billion dollars was done on the twin pillars of Chinese slave labor and American fatuousness.

But they were always gorgeous things.  Sleek.  Sexy.  Cool.  I owned them for that reason alone.  The image that they allowed me was one that I craved.  But at the end of the day, they never really did the job that well.  The image did not fulfill the real world needs, just the imaginary and self referential desires that I held.

They were always just outside of fully-functional, substituting cool for that final, ugly little bit of something that allowed them to become yours.  My four year old Compaq running Ubuntu is capable of anything I need to do.  Android is looking preferable to the iPhone and iPod.  Amazon Fire is staring at iPad.   All of these options are open to everyone, without stepping into the Victorian High Tea that Apple worked so hard to create.

Apple was always about creating something that you wanted to be seen with.  What you did with it was secondary that driving purpose

Sunday Night Viewing 10/08/11

It is just a night at the inappropriate funnies.

Occupy

 “We have this ability in Lake Wobegon to look reality right in the eye and deny it.” 

You know, I'm OK with the Occupy Wall Street thing.  Yeah, it has tinges of the hippy earth muffin thing going on, which doesn't suit my personal taste, but that is just a style thing.  I have friends who lean toward the hippy whom I treasure.

I think that I like them because they are the opposite side of disaffection from the Tea Baggers.

It would appear to me that the greater bulk of the population in this country is getting vigorously butt-fucked by the "bigs".  The money is being mined from the lower and middle classes as rapidly as possible.  There lies the problem.

The tea party seems to be formed around the concept that they should be allowed to participate as part of the "pitcher" status in this societal butt-fuck.

The occupy wall street crowd seems to be saying that the butt-fucking really shouldn't be happening anyway.

Guess who I am rooting for?

Off to Pioneer Square I go.

Just Enjoy the Show

The Daily Show
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Solarians or the Machine Stops

Neal Stephenson has recently published a piece over at the World Policy Institute titled Innovation Starvation.  A thankful hat trick has to go out to Russell over at Reflexiones Finales.

My oh my, did it ever strike a chord.   Now I will freely grant that I have read every book and major work by Stephenson.  Some I have read several times (I am fascinated by the period following the Thirty Years War to 1725).  I would posit that I would be a acolyte should he ever start a religion.

But the article in question really set my thoughts reeling down a long hallway was the idea that took me to  conclusions that others will find distasteful.  While I agree with Mr Stephenson central premise that the ability to innovate is being ruthlessly stomped out, I come to a completely different reason for the lack.

It all started with this quote for Mister Stephenson:

  ....and provide jobs for the burgeoning middle class that was the basis for our stable democracy.

At first, the statement seemed innocuous.  Just breezed over it, mind fluff.  But when I started reading through the article, I began to realize that the conditions that he so aptly described flowed from the "Burgeoning middle class" that this supposed innovation was to serve.

Hear me out now.  Because I realize that in American politics, picking on the middle class is a sure way to get yourself lynched, or at least digitally tarred and feathered.  But go through the article and pick out the real meat of Mr. Stephenson's hypotheses concerning the failure to innovate;  The desire of this society to reduce risk to absolute minimums.  This abhorrence of risk is deeply rooted in the middle class.

The reason that we do not truly innovate is that we are too comfortable and bourgeois a society to do so.

I'm going to say that again.

The reason that we do not truly innovate is that we are too comfortable and bourgeois a society to do so.

We have too many "educated" middle people who are just smart enough to know what side their bread is buttered on.  They will resist any significant change to the gravy train.  The poor are just the poor.  They don't have enough money to buy an election, so they get tossed hither and yon.  The rich don't see any reason to upset the apple cart that is making regular deliveries to their wallets.

The big ticket innovation that Mr. Stephenson wistfully remembers is the product of a specific time and mindset.  It is, in a sense, the gravestone of a generation, built in advance.  It is the desperation of the great depression, tempered by the crucible of the second world war, and made giddy with the wealth of being the last man standing in industrial might.

We are the children and grandchildren of these people.  We are more concerned about maintaining our relative status and outward displays of wealth than carving a rocket powered stonehenge.

Dead Wealth

This is the cover photo this week over at the Economist.  I can't dog these guys too much, if at all.  I have been a subscriber since 1989 and read the thing cover to cover every week.

But I think that they are beginning to hyperventilate a little bit lately.  Probably rightfully so.  things are getting pretty close-run at the present.  But when you go and read their article, it seems to me that what this clarion call consists of is a drama-tinged cry for more taxpayer money to bail out the banks that have overlent and got us into this problem in the first place.

Look, what is at play here is the ill gotten gains that the banks have booked.  They loan out too much money to dicey borrowers, the borrowers go south, the banks are screwed.   Like it or not, the banks are screwed because of their own bad decisions and panting greed.  They tried to force growth so that they could reap big profits and when the growth proved to be ephemeral, they took losses.  I think the best analogy is when a farmer puts down fertilizer (bullshit) that hasn't been properly composted.  It kills the crop.

It is not the duty of a country to backstop banks.  When people put their coin into a bank, they are doing a business transaction.  When banks go south through simple bad luck, or malfeasance, they are doing a business transaction.  Simply put, failure is part and parcel of any business transaction.

The too-big-to-fail banks really aren't.  There is enough current backstop to cover the depositors in the country (Which I think is a mistake, but it is there), so really all we are looking at is the banks not being able to pile more too-hot fertilizer on a dying plant.

We have to go through a withdrawal here.  My lord it is going to be painful.  But in the end about ten years out and a bunch of withdrawal later, we might be able to get moving again at an appropriate pace.  What we have now is nothing more than the end of our adolescence.

I think that you all ought to watch this next clip.  I saw it years ago when Ken Burns first debuted it on PBS, and Dave Cohen over at Decline of the Empire reminded me of it last week (thank you).  But it is a astonishingly faithful metaphor for the world in the last twenty years.

Zooniverse

Just an odd thought, check out the link below for the Ancient Lives project.

Give it a go, I just spent an hour

About

The Poison of the Past

I cannot say enough good things about Dave Cohen over at Decline of the Empire.  Erudite, well-read, with excellent analysis and presentation of a difficult and often contradictory subject matter.


But his post last Saturday disturbed me greatly.  In a way, Dave has presented the stone that we bear today.  The sepia toned propaganda of a "golden age" which poisons our view of the past and our abilities to cherish the present and the future.


Of course the fifties were a golden age.  Shit, the USSTAF and the FEAF pretty much assured that the industrial capacity of continental Europe and Japan was about that of Alabama.  The Luftwaffe obigingly performed the same service for Great Britain.


So jobs were freely available, we even set up a good-hearted installment plan for Europe in the shape of the Marshall plan (good for business that was) and MacArthur set Japan on a course with a lot of help with American know-how and under the table payments during the Korean War.


The game was rigged in our favor in every which way during the 1950's.  Hell, we even had a president or two who would stand up to the military-industrial complex on occasion.   But this was a rare and almost unique time in history and totally disconnected from the remainder of the history of the United States.


Nostalgia about this period of time is self-defeating.   Even folk like Dave who realize in their soul of souls that the fifties were an illusion seem to stare longingly at the images of a stilted past.


We boomers that are now on our way to our long home seem to keep returning to the Ozzie and Harriet days in our dreams.  But that is just the longing for a lost youth and the societal immaturity that allowed us to spend our descendant's legacy.


Hell, might as well go whole hog.  Buy a red corvette.